I'm running a Halloween sale of one of my witch books starting today, but I dropped the price last week. So I've been monitoring ranking. Last week it took >72 hrs for ranking to update paid in the US.
We need to think of new ways to promote books with book promotions.
I still don't see a rational reason for this. Maybe when Amazon slowed ranking changes, it inadvertently created a delay in this kind of change as well.
The way I see it, the new system damages one day sale blitzes (free and 99c). Who does that effect? BookBub. So suspicions can run wild here. But it also props up old books while damaging new releases. That's something perhaps Amazon has not thought out. Or maybe there's so many books that they don't care? Or maybe it's a new system some IT wizard came up with on Amazon and they never thought out how it could effect writers?
For us, outside of Bookbub promos, still playing with the timing may help. Book sales before my promo might help ranking somewhat before the real promo begins today. Spreading out promotions might work somewhat? But I'm not sure. Interestingly, all this seems to only be affecting Canada and US, as far as I know.
Spreading out promos has been better for some time.
Slowing ranking changes could easily be intended to affect BookBub. Though why Amazon cares what BookBub does is a mystery to me. People used to theorize that Amazon was trying to drive BookBub's value down so that it could buy it for a bargain price and run it itself, but that theory was floated so long ago that I think if it were true, Amazon would have made a move by now.
Of course, Amazon may just want people to take what they spend on Bookbubs and spend it on AMS. That theory does make sense. But if the authors here are any indication, the strategy is often having the opposite effect, making authors less willing to give money to Amazon on the assumption that Amazon is trying to screw them. Another theory that could be true is that Amazon didn't want an external company to have so much influence over its top 100 lists. That's possible but difficult to verify or refute without more data.
If Amazon wants to build AMS revenues, the best way to do that would be to find ways to boost the effectiveness of AMS, which seems to have declined over the years. I've seen anomalies related to odd ad placement that could occasionally be the result of people picking unwise ad targets, but it happens too often for that to be the only explanation. And when Amazon keeps showing me the same ad(s) for like a month, that seems ineffective. Do people uninterested on the first 28 views suddenly decide on the 29th appearance that the book they've been uninterested in is suddenly interesting? Some of the ads shown to me aren't even in genres I've ever looked at or bought. What a waste of ad real estate!
Here's another troubling thing. The slowing down of the flip from free to paid rankings doesn't seem as if it does anything except frustrate customers. It doesn't serve the same alleged purpose that slowing rankings does. That at least seems to be an indication of a bug rather than a feature, as does the sometimes weird ad placements. The same is true of slower book processing (though my last one in mid-September was up in hours, so I'm not sure how widespread that issue is).
Some of what Amazon does may be due to strategy, but the varying nature of the problems indicates to me that at least some of them are more likely neglect than strategy. Amazon tends not to notice things very fast unless there are a lot of customer complaints. Vendor complaints are less effective, but again, Amazon is more responsive to large numbers than small ones. How much human oversight there is in the retail division could well be questioned.
